Archive for August, 2013

Karen and I rap about MEMS in Google Glass, energy harvesters, wine sniffers, and other cool apps - plus smart (sensor) fusion technology and highlights of the upcoming MEMS Executive Congress in November 2013.

A recent Financial Times (FT) article doesn’t mince words in calling China’s “international theft of inventions part of a national business model.” According to the story, China is following an approach long sanctioned by many other Asian countries.

This article, penned by Mark Anderson, chief executive of Strategic News Service, begins with the recent identification by Mandiant – a cyber security specialist – of the theft of foreign intellectual property by a Chinese army unit. But the author notes that Japan in the 1970s was the first practitioner of this new “information mercantilism.” These activities led to the unwanted IP transfer of four US technologies: TV, DRAM, video recording, and steel production. Within a few years, these industries disappeared in the US. Since then, South Korea has adopted and refined this model, explains Anderson.

Courtesy of the Financial Times

Everyone in the semiconductor industry knows the critical importance and financial value of IP. It is not hyperbole to write that IP theft is ruining countries and shifting both military power and economic wealth in ways that were previously unimaginable.

I encourage readers to contemplate the entire FT article and its growing list of comments. You may need to take a brief survey or even pay a very small fee to access the complete article. But it’s well worth the price. Besides, you don’t want to spread the Internet’s “content mercantilism” by stealing good stories without paying for their creation.